And Miles to Go Before I Eat, and Miles to Go . . .

By RICK MARIN

Published: October 18, 2000

ARMONK, N.Y.—
HOW far would you drive for a great doughnut?

How long would you wait? How much punishment would you endure?

''Doughnuts Limited to One Dozen Per Person,'' barks one of many signs at Schultz's Cider Mill, a ramshackle farm stand on Old Route 22 here, along with ''Please Have Payment Ready, Thank You'' and ''No Doughnuts Sold on This Side of the Bench.''

Those are the Cider Mill Rules. Ignore them at your own risk.

From Labor Day to mid-November -- high doughnut season -- the faithful wait obediently in line at this legendary roadside attraction. Two thousand or more people show up each weekend in their Range Rovers and Volvos just to experience that old-time taste (crispy outside and custardy smooth inside) hot off a machine that looks as if it should be cranking out parts for a Model T. They wait 45 minutes in line. They stamp their feet in the chill Westchesterian air waiting to warm themselves with a steaming bag of plain, cinnamon or powdered sugar, at $5 a dozen. The place is swarming with yellow jackets and kids. This is a scene. You can't -- and should not -- miss it, because Schultz's is under contract to sell to a developer.

By next year, it may be a Food Emporium.

Being a doughnut purist from way back, I drove up to Armonk two Sundays ago to check out the joint.

We got there around 11 a.m., my doughnut date and I, just in time to pull into a prime spot being vacated by a green Lexus S.U.V. driven by a woman in a blond bob with one hand on the wheel and the other steering a powdered doughnut into her mouth.

Promising.

As we joined the snaking line -- an Old Navy parade of fleece, oversize sweaters and clogs -- I sank into remembrances of doughnuts past. Dense, dark ones coated with a clear sugar glaze, available at almost any coffee shop or greasy spoon in Toronto in the 1960's and 70's. My deep-fried madeleines.

It wasn't just me. Canadians supposedly consume more doughnuts per capita than anyone in the world. The late Tim Horton, a stalwart defenseman for the Toronto Maple Leafs, combined the two national pastimes in 1964 by opening Tim Hortons -- a nationwide doughnut chain that does not believe in apostrophes. Toronto, once known as ''Toronto the Good'' because it seemed to have a church on every corner, has long since been renamed ''The Big Donut'' (always spelled fast-food style) after its replacement religion.

But back to America.

''Omigod! Are you having your first ever?'' asked Georgine Capazzo, who lives in Eastchester, grew up in Chappaqua and has been coming to Schultz's for 17 years. She vowed to keep an eye on us after we had received our order, so as not to miss the rapture of a first-timer.

Conspiratorially, she confessed, ''These are the only doughnuts that don't give me a stomachache.'' Then she kicked her praise up a notch. ''These aren't doughnuts,'' she said. ''They're art.''

Debbie Kase of Armonk said she, too, had been coming for 17 years, since her youth in New Rochelle. ''It's just a great tradition, something you have to do,'' she explained. ''It's like a taste of the old days back in the 60's.''

Another woman asked not to be quoted by name. ''I don't want people to know I waited in line 20 minutes for doughnuts,'' she said, sheepishly but eagerly awaiting her half-and-half split of cinnamons and powders.

There are, in fact, two lines, one for the doughnuts themselves and another for coffee or hot cider fresh from Schultz's cider press and -- just to push the fat intake over the top -- burgers and dogs. A sign for this line reads, ''Be Warned: When necessary, doughnut sales at this counter will be limited to ONE doughnut PER DRINK purchase. No exceptions.''

Putting up signs was a necessary crowd control measure, said Peter Murphy, who runs the doughnut side of things with his wife, Joan Murphy (nee Schultz). ''If you don't, people say, 'How come you don't have a sign?' '' There was some trouble a few years ago, he said. ''A fellow tried to jump the line. People complained to us, and we asked him to leave.'' No police or anything. To leave Schultz's with no doughnuts is punishment enough.

Mrs. Murphy and her four siblings now run the business started in 1951 by their father, Edwin Schultz, 88, who still helps out at the produce counter, tallying bills in black crayon on paper bags.

For the youngsters, the main visual attraction is the Belshaw Century 100, the machine that Mr. Murphy said can crank out 3,600 doughnuts on a busy day. Parents hold their little ones up against a plexiglass screen and watch blobs of dough punched out into a river of 375-degree oil take shape as they float up the conveyor belt, two-by-two. At the halfway point of their three-minute journey, they are excitingly flipped over to reveal a glistening, golden cooked side as they make their way to the finish line, dropping off onto a countertop to be pushed around in piles of cinnamon or powdered sugar by a tong-wielding teenager.

The recipe is an old family secret, the alchemic result of constant trial and error, Mr. Murphy said, coming up with just the right dusting of cinnamon and nutmeg. Turns out, people don't like them too spicy. And the weather is crucial. ''You want low humidity,'' he said.

The process is not speedy. It might be described as agonizingly slow. Their ravenous mouths watering, impatient customers might be moved to scream, ''In the name of all that's holey, buy another machine!''

Mr. Murphy complained that the Belshaw, which was new in 1983 but looks more like 1953, uses ''a tremendous amount'' of electricity, driving their Con Ed bills to $800 a month up from $300 or $400 when the machine is not operating. He made it sound like another reason to sell now while the selling is good. ''We're getting ready to retire,'' said Mr. Murphy, who is 50 and has been making doughnuts since 1972. ''There are a lot of aching backs here. It's a bit much after a while.''

Before getting back to cleaning doughnut debris from the tables, he said negotiations for the sale of Schultz's have been slow. He guessed they would be around for another summer ''and probably another fall.''

By this point we had survived both the doughnuts and drinks lines and had secured a table with minimal yellow jacket activity. We had already started digging into the steaming paper bags as soon as we ponied up our $5 at the cash register.

And? Crisp in a wafer-thin layer outside, melt-in-your-mouth moist inside. Just the right dusting of crunchy cinnamon sugar. The powdered sugar was not too overpowering. We ate a half-dozen immediately and continued to work through the bag the rest of the day, later grudgingly offering a taste of manna to a couple of lucky friends. Delicious.

Not quite the doughnuts of my youth. But those, I fear, may be as distant a memory as a Maple Leaf Stanley Cup.

Schultz's Cider Mill is at 103 Old Route 22 in Armonk; (914) 273-8720. It is open daily, 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; doughnuts are sold on weekends only.

Photos: THE WAIT -- The line at Schultz's Cider Mill in Armonk, N.Y.; THE WARNING -- Advice for the pilgrims.; THE BITE -- A dozen in a steaming bag, $5. (Photographs by Chris Maynard for The New York Times); THE REWARD Plain, cinnamon or powdered doughnuts. (Richard Harbus for The New York Times)(pg. F1); HURRY UP! Joy Cavallaro and Steven Sachel putting sugar on doughnuts at Schultz's. (Richard Harbus for The New York Times)(pg. F6)